PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Ryan Baldini
TI  - The importance of population growth and regulation in human life history evolution
AID  - 10.1101/001404
DP  - 2013 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 001404
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2013/12/14/001404.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2013/12/14/001404.full
AB  - Explaining the evolution of human life history characteristics remains an outstanding problem to evolutionary anthropologists. Progress is hindered by common misunderstandings of how selection works in age-structured populations. I review two important results of life history theory related to demography. First, different life history strategies evolve under density-independent and density-dependent population growth. Second, and more poorly appreciated, different kinds of density-dependence also select for different life history strategies; assuming zero population growth alone is insufficient to determine the optimal strategy. I show that these facts are more than methodological niceties by reanalyzing the model by Kaplan et al. (2000) and showing that the results depend strongly on the form of population regulation assumed. This analysis suggests that progress in human life history theory requires better understanding of the demography of our ancestors. I close with a discussion of empirical implications.